Letters to Juliet - Film Review

Letters to Juliet - Film Review

A young American couple take a trip to Verona, Italy. It’s a kind of honeymoon, though they have yet to actually marry. The guy, Victor, is a chef full of himself, and he’s on the lookout for fresh recipes, so much so that he neglects his beautiful girlfriend, Sophie, wonderfully played by Amanda Seyfried.

She finds she has time to herself and pays a visit to Juliet’s balcony, yes that Juliet from Romeo and… fame, where travellers looking for lost loves leave desperate love letters in the stone wall below the balcony.

The tiny fact that Romeo and Juliet is fiction, and the characters never existed doesn’t put off the letter writers one bit – but then again when you are lovelorn sometimes you will try anything.

Even more strangely every day the letters that come from all round the globe, are collected up by a team of ladies who populate an office around the corner, where the letters are read and duly replied to, and that really does happen! I have seen them at work.

Sophie finds her way to the letter writing office and soon becomes part of the team and when she finds a letter deep within the wall that was written fifty years ago and has been sitting there ever since, she thinks it is never too late and sets about writing and sending a caring reply, on behalf of Juliet of course.

The next thing is the lady, played by Vanessa Redgrave, turns up in Verona, accompanied by her bumptious grandson, very well played by Christopher Egan. They have come to try and track down her lost love from fifty years before, one Lorenzo Bartolini. What is it they say? It is never too late.

Sophie and the grandson can’t stand the sight of each other, and anyway, she’s on her honeymoon, except she isn’t, her boyfriend is still far too busy to look after his fab girlfriend, the schmuck, so the three of them, grandmother, grandson, and Sophie, set out across the beautiful Italian countryside checking out all the Lorenzo Bartolini’s in the region, and there are quite a few of them, and a wild and weird bunch they turn out to be, but rarely dull at that.

“Letters to Juliet” is a feelgood film often described as “enchanting” and even a “soppy love story” but it is much more than that too.

The pictures are truly wonderful, but then again with such a wonderful backdrop it would be hard for them not to be. It’s a gentle film but never slow or dull and one I am happy to recommend.